Lake Communications Limited

5.4. Lessons learnt and advice for other companies

Brian Kennedy gives the following advise to companies looking to implement eBusiness solutions:

• Ensure your in-house IT/IS infrastructure is well thought out and built with fault tolerance and load balancing. If not, ensure you have extremely good external support contracts with Service Level Agreements in place
• Make sure you get a buy in from your B2B partners at a senior level rather than from line managers. Try and get a contractual agreement in place to define obligations and time lines
• Asses your partners IT capability prior to planning timescales
• Run thorough tests prior to going live, replicating a realistic or exact load on your systems
• eBusiness solutions are dynamic and are constantly evolving as newer technologies emerge
• Look as what eBusiness can do for you from a business perspective before you embark on any technology spend. Build you project team from senior management to ensure that the project receives support at board level. Remember look at an eBusiness solution from a business need viewpoint rather than a nice to have technology solution

5.5. Future Plans

The supply chain system has been fully operational since June 2001. LAKE now plans to roll out its system to its other telecommunications customers.

The company plans to promote new products and services on its B2C site to expose the LAKE brand into existing and emerging markets.